Bob Hartig and I left Grand Rapids, MI, shortly after 12:00pm EDT. We arrived at Burlington, IA around 5:30/6:00pm EDT. I could see on satellite that this area had ample heating for several hours and a possible boundary to work with. The satellite also revealed a mid-level impulse or in other words a cloud deck that was aiming right for the warm moist atmosphere with excellent sever parameters. Bob and I decided that it would be wise to stay ahead of the leading edge of the cloud deck . We caught this storm from it inception. It started as a small little base and continued to grow into a classic supercell. It was within 10 minutes that it started to show signs of becoming a supercell.

We followed the supercell for several miles as it gained strength and then took another series of structure photos.  We were south of route 34 on some nice paved farm roads.

This storm had an extremely beautiful tilted updraft tower with low level striations

It began to lower and form a wall cloud. This storm would continue to cycle and form several wall clouds.

Below I stitched some shots together because this storm would not fit into my wide angle lens.  Great banding and wall cloud

Soon after this stitched pic we witnessed a funnel for about 2 minutes south of Abingdon, IL. We did not see any debris but this is what I believe was counted as tornado#1 and is on the SPC storm reports.

This wall cloud we witnessed as we were on route 8.

Bob Hartig, has a much more detailed write up  of our chase, so if you visit his site you can get more details as to our locations.

The next series of  photos is of the third tornado which struck Elmwood, IL.  The storm was showering lightning in very close proximity to the tornado during the whole 13 minute life cycle.  We were with in 1/4 of a mile and could hear the tornado. It sounded like a rocket engine and we could hear the building rip apart. The next shots are video grabs:

Lightning actually went through the tornado. Probably the only shot of this out there on the web.

Another close strike:

You could see where the bolt hit the ground here:

Tornado as it is hitting Elmwood. What some have described as a second funnel was actually inflow into the wall cloud, but it very well could have had horizontal rotation. Again my thoughts and prayers for those affected by this natural disaster.

Full HD video of the Elmwood Tornado life cycle:

We continued on after this and another tornado touched down 3 miles to the east of Elmwood. We caught several more tornadoes as seen in this video below:


We also caught a night time tornado.  It is barely visible in this video grab but it was definitely there. Bob reported this tornado on Spotter Network. Another chaser did as well, so we were not seeing things.

These lightning shots were taken just on Route 24 just before I-57